Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Wireless Portable Cell Phone Drive Unveiled

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 02, 2007 09:56 AM
from the handy-little-guy dept.
Communications Data Storage Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "According to Ars Technica Seagate has unveiled a new portable drive that fits in the palm of your hand and has a 20GB capacity, but most importantly features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. It's called DAVE, which stands for Digital Audio Video Experience and it lets you stream music, videos and other data to your mobile. It can also interact with a variety of other devices, such as PDAs, laptops, PCs and cameras, making it perfect for transferring data from your phone to another device or vice versa." Update: 02/02 14:06 GMT by Z : Indeed, you may have enjoyed our recent discussion on this technology. Feel free to draw from it for another round of portable-cell-drive-related conversation.
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Technology: Mass Storage For Phones 107 comments
The Demo conference started today, and the first news out of it comes from Seagate, which will be introducing pocket-sized, 20-GB, Bluetooth-equipped drives for cellphones this summer. They call this tech "DAVE" (one wonders whether the acronym or the expansion came first). Quoting: "DAVE-based products will be about the size of a credit card and less than half and inch thick, with an operating range of up to 30 feet from the connected phone... Software to hook the drives up to cellphones has already been produced for J2ME, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian and XCCC. Palm compatibility is forthcoming. The platform is open source..."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Wireless Portable Cell Phone Drive Unveiled 25 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Dupe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:00AM (#17857906) Homepage Journal
    DAVE: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
    HAL: Affirmative, DAVE, I read you.
    DAVE: Can you check for dupes please?
    HAL: I'm sorry DAVE, I'm afraid I can't do that.

    Here [slashdot.org]

  • Car audio (Score:4, Funny)

    by Joebert (946227) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:00AM (#17857908) Homepage
    I can't wait to attempt a DRM protected transfer from this thing to my car stereo, just so I can hear the stereo give me the error, "I'm sorry, I can't do that dave".
    • Better do it quick, as I fear in the next year a similar attempt to transfer DRMed stuff will be met with:
      "You tried to steal intellectual property. I'm alerting the BSA police of your conduct as instructed by PATRIOT ACT IV. Better hide that illegal linux box polluting the home subnet." :)

  • Sharing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eggoeater (704775) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:00AM (#17857910) Journal
    I wonder how the MAFIAA will feel about people using this device to share music to multiple devices?
    They'll probably try to outlaw it.


  • Not that new. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy (12016) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:02AM (#17857936) Homepage
    My second Generation Aireo had a 20 gig drive that was smaller and thinner than a matchbox that took quite a pounding and survived. I think Hitachi has had sub 1 inch drives available for a really long time as well.

    Now, get the power draw to below that of Flash and they have something. Inside cellphones power useage is everything. My Razr lasts 6 times longer than my blackberry does or the treo did.

    People want longer battery life way more than being able to download at $0.99 each (Plus airtime) 20 gigs of music on their phone.
    • You grossly misunderstood the article. The novelty is not "small hard drive." The novelty is "20G hard drive with its own Bluetooth and WiFi radios and battery."
      • Ok but at the size of a razor, remind me again how big 2.5 drives are and their capacity. Then look at the size of a bluetooth chip and battery. I will take the extra inch on the device and the extra 140GB capacity.

        Hell, I will take a 3.5" drive if it were the size of a brick if I could set it next to my laptop, PC, PDA or whatever and have it act like a NAS. Why create the storage space, if I were a competitor I would create a happy little USB adapter that you can plug any device into and hand the inf

  • A hard disk crash on my cellphone. Yay.

  • Seagate expects DAVE's battery life to be able to handle about 14 days of standby and 10 hours of media streaming performance.

    It will also be an open-source system, allowing third-party developers to write apps to interface with DAVE from various devices.

    Where do I sign?

  • Useful, but (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SighKoPath (956085) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:04AM (#17857964)
    I wonder how strong DAVE's security is? Will malicious individuals be able to snoop into my files? I see no mention of security anywhere in the article.

  • Unless your carrier is Verizon... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by timbck2 (233967) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <2kcbmit>> on Friday February 02 2007, @10:05AM (#17857972) Homepage
    ...in which case this would be useless to you, since Verizon disables Bluetooth file transfer on their phones.

  • Pics and video... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Odiumjunkie (926074) on Friday February 02 2007, @10:05AM (#17857978)
    here [mobilemag.com]
  • I have 5 phones in my house that all in theory have the ability to mate with my PC to do 'something'. But here's the funny part. Only one does and only through Bluetooth and only in a very limited way. The rest, well you can BUY a cable to connect them but in fact there is no software in existence in the world that can make any use of it. Not even the 'software' you can buy with the cable. All it can do, and this is a crapshoot at best, is sometimes enable your cell phone to be a modem.

    Carriers specify that

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tony Hoyle (11698)
      Carriers specify that all the other features be crippled because they want you to use THEIR services. Why synch jpegs with your PC when you can PAY to use picturemail? Why download ringtones when you can BUY them.

      Get a new carrier. No good carrier would restrict a phone in the manner you describe - only a crappy one.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by SaDan (81097)
        Or get a non-locked phone. The carrier only screws with phones they subsidize.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by silas_moeckel (234313)
      Sounds like your phone carrier likes to cripple there phones. If your carrier is GSM get an unlocked phone and do whatever you would like they are not that expensive.

    • Does anyone seriously believe that there will ever be PDA-like software that can sync the phone to the PC? Stop smoking weed, please.
      just buy a smartphone. ActiveSync will do the synchronization for you and you're allowed to do filetransfer so you can up/download sounds/pictures/whatever.

      for the record, I've stopped smoking weed a long time ago, and my smartphone has been doing exactly what you want for more than 2 years now.

    • ... we're tired of the crap that normal phones force upon us.

      Expecting commercially-oriented and service-tied phones to do what *we* want is futile.

      Take your destiny in your own hands and help us build something that suits our community needs and your personal needs, not those of the carriers.

      Official site [openmoko.com]
      Pictures and press info [openmoko.com]
      Blogs and notices [openmoko.org]
      Mailing lists [openmoko.org]

      ... and join us on IRC at freenode #OpenMoko. (Don't ask "When can I get it?" on the channel, just type "counter" for the countdown to the various de

      • Or pay for your phone yourself and get an uncrippled one. Or move away from the US and even get an uncrippled subsidized one. Your horizon seems quite narrow.

        Yes, dipshit, I think most people's horizons are too narrow to actually MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY to get a better cell phone. If you actually did that, you're probably insane.

        • Yes, dipshit, I think most people's horizons are too narrow to actually MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY to get a better cell phone.
          The nationalistic pride that you Americans display really goes too far sometimes. Come on, if you'd just look a little further, there's a whole world out there, full of fascinating possibilities and opportunities. You could save several cents on your phone bill by moving to Europe.
  • Anyone else read that as "Wireless Portable Cell Phone Unveiled". I thought some company thought it had the greatest thing ever and reinvented the cell phone or something...:-p
  • Who gives a crap about cell-phones - 20 gigs of storage that I can blue-tooth into unwired glasses and ear phones - add in an input device for the hand (how about a blue tooth wireless controler?) and I could mod up a "cheap" wearable that could play some old games, show me my documents/pictures/videos - the link in the cell phone for internet access and some chat capablility..

    Give it 10 years... you'll be using something like that.

    -GiH

      • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by QuickFox (311231)

        And now they're pretending it was deliberate. What a pile of shit.
        Are you seriously saying that you don't notice that Zonk's update is an embarrassed apology?

        "Pretending it was deliberate"? I hope you're trying to make some kind of joke.
          • People would be annoyed if they started deleting ongoing discussions.
            • People would be annoyed if they started deleting ongoing discussions.

              What ongoing discussions? Anyway, they could just take it off the "featured" list or whatever it is that makes it appear on the front page. Anyone in a flame war/discussion will still get notified of replies and can continue their argument, without being interrupted by all the "DUPE! posts.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.